The Long Pig Cookbook

The first thing we need to acknowledge is that cannibalism is hilarious. Now, I’m not talking about murder, either for cannibalism or for other reasons. While obviously murder can be fun, it can also often be grim, sad, or otherwise awful—which is to say it’s not inherently humorous.

Cannibalism is. It’s an absurd answer to an absurd question. The foot in the frying pan, the head in the freezer, the finger-lickin’ good fingers—you can’t see these images, in a movie or TV show, without chuckling. They hit a certain part of your brain that can’t quite process them; they’re ridiculous. But then so is the human body itself, with its unprotected dangly bits, its flab and its skin issues, its uncontrollable spasms and overall boniness. Who could look at us and feel hungry? We may not know where that particular foot has been, but we know where our own have, and the thought of devouring them is, or should be, stomach-churning. Are you a breast man or an ass man? Do kids fight over the belly button as they would a wishbone?

I’ve been thinking about cannibalism lately for a bunch of reasons: A vendor made a random cannibal joke on a work call the other day; this news about a 4,000-year-old mass murder where the victims were eaten (cue joke about British cuisine); and I’ve been watching the TV show Yellowjackets, about a New Jersey girls’ high school soccer team whose plane crash-lands in the Canadian Rockies in 1996. As you might expect of any story about soccer, there’s a good bit of cannibalism involved. (Sadly, that plot line was cut from Bend It Like Beckham.) I won’t give away any spoilers, since the show is still developing, but its cannibalism toes the line between horror and humor. At one moment you have the image of teenage girls feasting on human flesh; at another, they’re awkwardly admitting to one another that they liked it.

I haven’t finished season two yet, so I don’t know if it will reach the comedic heights of, say, Silence of the Lambs, whose Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter is surely the most famous and uproarious man-eater to grace the screen. “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti,” he tells FBI agent Clarice Starling of a census-taker who once visited him. This is, of course, a huge joke he’s playing on Starling and, I guess, the audience, because wine people agree Chianti’s a bad choice here.

“That is gross,” said my friend Jeff Porter, who knows northern Italian wines better than most. “Ripasso Valplicella would be best,” he said, or a Fumin from Valle d’Aosta. The minerality of the organ meat, he said, “is the toughest part for food pairing—as most people overcook liver.” Now if you turned the liver into a pâté or a mousse, you’d have plenty more pairing options, Jeff said, “from Champagne to sweet wine.”

Me, I’ve always been more curious about the fava beans. Where could you get fresh ones in the D.C. area during the 1980s? Did Lecter double-shell them, or did he get lazy and just remove the pod? Were they better in the end than the meat they accompanied? Though Lecter himself is terrifying, his gourmet pretensions undermine his cannibal rep—but then what can you expect of a guy who lived in Baltimore?

There are too many cannibal fictions to cover them all here, but my favorite ha-ha cannibal moment has to be from The Walking Dead’s fifth season, when Bob Stookey, a good guy played by Lawrence Gilliard Jr., whom you may remember as D’Angelo Barksdale from The Wire, has been kidnapped by the bad guys, who are quite hungry and so naturally cut off Bob’s leg, cook it, and eat it—right in front of his face.

“If it makes you feel better,” one of them tells Bob, “you taste much better than we thought you would.”

Bob, however, has an ace up his sleeve, so to speak. “I’ve been bitten, you stupid pricks!” he yells at his captors, laughing like a maniac and showing off the zombie mark on his shoulder, earned earlier in the episode. “I’m tainted meat! Tainted meat! You eating tainted meat!”

He got them pretty good, eh? It’s a like a post-apocalyptic McDonald’s E. coli scandal, only no one’s getting out of it with a recall and a PR campaign.

More after the rewards program…

To be clear, real-life cannibalism is bad, but still absurd. The case of Arwin Meiwes—the German who in 2001 took to the Internet in search of a "young well-built man, who wanted to be eaten," and who found and devoured Bernd Brandes—is well-documented:

These details are so ridiculous, and yet I’m left wanting: Which Star Trek novel? What kind of schnapps? Who freezes their takeout pizza? (Are they sure it wasn’t DiGiorno?) Did he really just sauté the guy in garlic, day after day? That seems, you know, boring. As we all know, different cuts of meat require different cooking techniques, and pair well with different flavors, yet these cannibals, real as well as fictional, don’t bring much skill to their game. They’re not really foodies—they’re lunatics who want to butcher people, yet don’t have the (ahem) chops to make a proper meal of their victims.

The thing is, if cannibals were serious about food, they would never eat people in the first place, because they would know this: human meat is not worth eating. None of us is raised under controlled, farmlike conditions, so our health, our musculature, and our fat content (that is, our marbling) are highly variable. We prize Kobe beef so highly because the cows have been raised beautifully, with massages and daily bottles of beer, but I don’t think my regular glasses of wine and whiskey do quite the same thing. (We ain’t all USDA Prime, know what I mean?) Athletes, meanwhile, present their own culinary predicaments: With so much lean muscle, it’s going to take a lot to coax flavor from them—depending on the cut, either long, slow braising or quick searing. Both methods are going to need a good amount of added fat and other flavorings (fruit sauces work wonders with game, so why not for long pig?), and when you start to consider the details, you’d probably opt for pork, beef, or chicken.

As someone who has eaten a lot of strange meats—goat boobs, porcupine, bat—I find myself unable to think too deeply about the potential for human meat. It just does not seem appealing, particularly with so many other, better options at hand. (Like kangaroo—vastly underrated!) But maybe because I’ve tried such a wide variety of foods, that curiosity has been sated. Now, when I’m offered something “bizarre,” I can ask, “But does it taste good?” If the answer is yes, I’ll bite. If not—and usually, it’s a no, or a highly qualified yes—I can pass. I would send your back back.

That all changes, of course, once you strand me in the wilderness. When push comes to shove, I’ll shove anything in my face. You do what you have to to survive, and if that means consuming the frozen corpses of “my soccer teammates,” as I like to refer to my friends, family, newsletter subscribers, and fellow passengers, then so be it. You may be uncomfortable with that, but I can promise I will treat your body with the same care and thoughtfulness I would bring to an A5 Wagyu or a poulet de Bresse. My knives will be sharp, my cuts precise. I will sauce you with foraged blackberries; I will garnish you with spruce tips and wild sorrel; I will make strong stock from your bones and double-render your fat so it doesn’t smell. (And no, I’m not calling you fat—you look great!) And if I should expire before you, out there in the mountains, I hope you’ll treat me likewise: Braise me low and slow, my friends, season me properly, and feel free to laugh with every forkful. And if you’re inclined to consume my liver, please don’t serve Chianti. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It

Mostly, I hate Trader Joe’s: the focus on snacks, the terrible produce, the shameless ripping-off of smaller producers. But their miniature ice-cream cones rock, especially the peppermint-flavored ones that seem only to be available around the holidays. Sure, I feel guilty eating them, but not guilty enough to stop.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt